Hildebrand was called "the twentieth-century Doctor of the Church"[1] by Pope Pius XII. Pope John Paul II also greatly admired the work of Hildebrand, remarking once to his widow, Alice von Hildebrand, "Your husband is one of the great ethicists of the twentieth century." Benedict XVI also has a particular admiration and regard for Hildebrand, whom he knew as a young priest in Munich. The degree of Pope Benedict's esteem is expressed in one of his statements about Hildebrand: "When the intellectual history of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century is written, the name of Dietrich von Hildebrand will be most prominent among the figures of our time."

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Born and raised in Florence, in the Kingdom of Italy, Hildebrand grew up in a German household, the son of sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand and Irene Schäuffelen, who lived in a former Minimfriary. He received his early education from private tutors. Although raised in a home without religion, Hildebrand developed a deep belief in Jesus at a very young age.[4]

In 1912, he married Margaret Denck, and with her had one child, Franz.

In 1913 Hildebrand went to Rome to attend the First Communion of one of his sisters, in a ceremony held in the Catacombs of Callixtus. The following year he and his wife were received into the Catholic Church. Upon the outbreak of the First World War Hildebrand was drafted into service as a physician's assistant in Munich, serving as a kind of surgical nurse.[4]

Hildebrand published his first book, Die Idee der Sittlichen Handlung, in 1916, and two years later, after the war had ended, was given a teaching position at the University of Munich, eventually gaining an assistant professorship there in 1924. By then he had published another work, Sittlichkeit und Ethische Werterkenntniss (1921).[4]

When Hitler came to power in 1933 Hildebrand, a vocal opponent of Hitler and Nazism, fled Germany, going first to Italy, and then to Vienna. There, with the support of the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, he founded and edited an anti-Nazi weekly paper, Der Christliche Ständestaat ("The Christian Corporative State"). For this, he was sentenced to death in absentia by the Nazis.

Hildebrand retired from teaching in 1960, spending the remaining years of his life writing dozens of books in both German and English. He was a founder of Una Voce America. In 1957 his wife of forty-five years died, and in 1959 he married Alice M. Jourdain, also a philosopher and theologian who was a student of his at Fordham University.[6]